Cheers, Then
by She's So High
Summary: “Starting tomorrow, you will aid in the care of Hermione Granger. And from now until the day one of you dies, whichever of you may go first, you will be with her, remembering her as she was and witnessing firsthand how she is now.”


Cheers, Then

By: Lady DeathAngel

Disclaimer: All things Harry Potter are the sole property of JK Rowling. I am just borrowing them for a bit. 

Warnings: mature themes

A/N: Well, this is not a Draco/Hermione fic. This fic is based on them and their interaction, but they are not romantically inclined toward each other. Some may be disappointed, some elated. Um, yes a few of the ships in this may seem a bit random, but I've fallen in love with them. Anyway, please read, enjoy and review. 

  


On some level, I always thought she deserved what she got. Filthy little Mudbloods like her, presumptions chits who never realized their place . . . I thought she deserved it. And I hated myself for feeling that passionately about her. It was a given that I'd feel that passionate about Hero Potter. After all, he was everything I couldn't be. Special in some way that I saw but refused to acknowledge. Braver than men three times his age, stronger in mind and body than many could hope to be and still so damned human you couldn't figure out how he got the way he was. I hated him for it, but I was able to admit that to myself.

Weasel . . . he was just disgusting to me. I was a bit jealous of him. He had a family that I wished could have been mine. I would never admit it, but that family who loved each other no matter what and were happy despite the fact they were about as poor as my former House Elf . . . I wanted that. That's probably why I was happy to hear about Percy Weasley's detachment from the family. And then I saw Ron that year and he was with Harry and her and still as happy as anything. 

But even that, compared to the absolutely passionate dislike that I had for her, was acceptable. I would never be able to understand why I hated her so much. She was smarter than me, but that wasn't quite it. Plenty of people are smarter than me and I'm willing to say it aloud. Perhaps not as clever, but smarter. She wasn't some raving beauty that I would have given anything to have, so it wasn't some sort of unrequited love or lust scenario. She was a Mudblood, like so many at Hogwarts, and yet I hated her more than anyone. Almost more than Potter and Weasley combined. 

I could have been a combination of things. Her strong-will, intelligence surpassing that of any seventh year at any time during her duration at the school, her ability to let things roll off of her like water off of a stone. All of the things a pure-blooded witch should have been, but few were. Pansy, for instance, could never hope to stack up properly to Granger. And I told her as much, which prompted discourse among me and my fellow Slytherin, except, perhaps, Blaise. He knew, as well as I, that too few of the women we would end up marrying to keep our lines pure would be like that tainted Gryffindor. 

I think that was about the time the two of us decided to focus on getting out of Hogwarts with passable grades, all the while wondering if we'd ever get that summons to join the ranks of Death Eaters. I wasn't as excited about it as Blaise. I knew better than he did how absolutely stupid they all were. My father included. Cowards, all of them, with God complexes to rival those of the Dark Lord they so feared. They wanted power more than blood-purification. Mudbloods were just their target. They were supposedly weaker. 

Not Granger though. Never would she conform to any stereotype at all. She never did in Hogwarts as a bookworm with a temper and a famous boyfriend (two if you actually believed Rita Skeeter) and after, as a Mudblood Auror who, together with Potter and Weasley, took down more than her fair share of Death Eaters. I watched as she fought, once. She was backed into a corner by none other than my father. She looked scared to him, her face ashen and her hands shaking. He had removed his hood and was telling her what he planned to do to her. 

_Cruciatus_ wouldn't be horrid enough, he informed her, but it would still be performed. But he wanted more. He wanted _her_. Much in the same way I did. Begging for mercy, at a loss for words. More than I did. Damaged beyond repair. He managed the word _Crucio_ once, and while he waited for her screams to abate she managed one word under her breath. I watched as the wand that she'd dropped inches from my face flew into her hand and she cursed my father's soul right out of his body. I never would have thought her capable of _Avada Kedavra_, but apparently she was. 

It was then that she looked at me, her eyes unreadable. 

"Will you surrender now?" she asked in a voice hoarse from screams that had made my aching body shudder in remembered pain and revulsion at where I was, what I was seeing, what I was _hearing_. 

"You'll be wanting to say yes," Weasley said, walking into the room with Potter beside him. "If you feel like making it out of here alive that is."

I was too weak to nod, too nauseated to speak. But I managed to stand and my look must have said I had no desire to die like my father. I was sentenced to a year in an Azkaban unlike what it had been. No more Dementers to deal with. Just one man who had the responsibility of bringing us food tree times a day, and if he forgot it was our tough luck. I think Dumbledore may have had something to do with the fact that I wasn't there for longer. He visited me two days after I'd been in that dank cell.

"You never killed." he said, looking haggard in a way that I had never witnessed on a living person before. "You never tortured anyone. You were very much an inactive Death Eater. For that it was decided one year here should be enough."

He died in battle two months later. Lucky for me, I was able to coerce newspapers off of our care-taker otherwise I never would have known. The death toll kept rising. Unnamed Muggles, Mudbloods I had known in school, witches and wizards with blood as pure as mine who'd chosen the wrong side, and Death Eaters I had worked beside and felt nothing for. Nothing at all. I kept wondering when Voldemort would stop hiding and face Potter. I wasn't sure of the outcome, but I did know that the longer it was put off, the harder it would be for Potter to be defeated. The man was a madman, in some respects. He had two things to lose and even then, the three of them had probably come to some sort of pseudo-heroic agreement not to worry about one another in battle. It was the sort of thing they'd do. He wouldn't fail because he knew what would happen if he did. He had nothing to lose for himself, and everything to lose for everyone else and he couldn't risk it. 

Voldemort was selfish, wanted power and was too afraid to lose to fight with everything he had. My money was on Potter.

It wasn't long after Dumbledore's death that my fellow inmates and I were set free and Azkaban became a smoldering pile of ash. I returned to the only life I had ever really lived, knowing that I was on the losing side. I still never killed anyone, and torture was below me. I was on the sidelines, present but not participating. And then it happened. The battle that decided it all.

I will say that I never expected for him to win and lose all at the same time. I wasn't there, but Blaise told me all I needed to know just minutes after it had happened. Potter had defeated Voldemort. Which satisfied me in a strange way. But Blaise was livid. He wouldn't allow Potter to win. He'd lost all sense in my opinion, but I went along anyway. At this point there were only a handful of us still alive, and Blaise gathered us together and we attacked Potter at the flat he'd shared with Weasley, and surprisingly enough, Granger. I watched as Blaise and a few others tortured and killed Potter and Weasley. Of that immortal trio I'd known most of my life, Granger was the only survivor, and that wasn't saying much. She managed to kill five out of six of us. As it turned out, I was as much of a coward as my father. She was killing with no thought or rhyme or reason and I was next. I panicked and fled. 

Snape found me at Malfoy Manor. It was decrepit and empty. It reflected the state of the family that had owned it. My father was dead, my mother had disappeared, and I was as good as dead. Someone would come along, knowing I'd watched as Potter and Weasley died, and they'd get revenge for them. Half of me expected it to be Granger. 

"I can't say I'm disappointed." he told me after emerging from my fireplace. 

I simply stared at him.

"I hope you're happy." he added. "Harry Potter, dead. Ronald Weasley, dead. And Hermione Granger, irreparably damaged and taking up residence at St. Mungos."

"What?" I asked sharply.

Snape used the sneer on me that he'd turned on Harry so many times all those years ago. Back when the most harm I could inflict on anyone wasn't enough to potentially destroy them completely. 

"She's certifiably insane, Draco, even by Wizard standards."

I blinked slowly before looking down at my hands.

"I was there."

"I know."

"Azkaban again?"

"Hardly. More like . . . a bit of community service."

I raised an eyebrow and looked back up at him to find his face set in lines that were cold and unfamiliar to me.

"Community service?"

"Starting tomorrow, you will aid in the care of Hermione Granger. And from now until the day one of you dies, whichever of you may go first, you will be with her, remembering her as she was and witnessing firsthand how she is now." 

"That sounds suspiciously like something Dumbledore would suggest." I told him, my voice as empty as the rest of me felt.

"Pack your bags." he ordered, ignoring my comment. "I've found you a flat closer to St. Mungo's and in much better shape than this place." His lip curled as he surveyed the room. "Besides, as of Sunday, Malfoy Manor is officially property of the Ministry of Magic." 

~*~

For two months I wasn't even allowed near her. She was in a room that I saw every day for those two months and that I'd probably see every day of my life thereafter. It was dark, the walls were padded and she sat in a corner, shrieking her bloody head off, screaming the names of Potter and Weasley over and over. Occasionally she screamed other names, and she yelled curses foul enough to send nurses from her ward with wide eyes and red cheeks. Some even came back with tears on their faces. She was under constant surveillance, with no visitors, no loved ones living who wanted to see her. Or so I was told.

Sarah Little was the head nurse of Granger's ward. She briefed me the morning after Snape had removed me from the Manor.

"Apparently she has no family. Her parents were killed in the Muggle Massacre a few years ago. The Weasley's, the only family living who care a whit about her, are a bit busy with their own problems and I've been informed that it's doubtful any of them will be around to see her. She has no other friends." 

Which was rather depressing. 

"I'll let you know in a few weeks whether or not you'll be expected to interact with her. But if she stays like this, it's doubtful you'll be able to go anywhere near her."

This was also depressing. In reality, I hated seeing her in her corner, wailing away like a banshee. That part of me that thought she deserved it was quickly becoming less and less vocal. With every day that I was told to sit in front of a pane of glass and watch as she yelled until she coughed up blood or as she threw herself at walls in anger and frustration and a grief so terrible it frightened me, I thought that maybe she didn't deserve it.

And then, like a storm, it passed. She went into a catatonic state for about three weeks. I was at her bedside every day. I was there when she woke up.

"Well, hello." She'd said with a grin. "Who're you?" 

It was my first time dealing with someone who I remembered but couldn't remember herself, let alone me. I told her I was Draco and that she was Hermione. She didn't remember how old she was. I told her she was going to be nineteen.

"Oh, really? When's my birthday?"

I couldn't really remember exact dates, but she didn't seem to care.

"Well, that's all right, really. Today can be my birthday. It's a nice day for a birthday, yeah?"

She had so many questions that after an hour and a half she was exhausted from talking and fell asleep. 

The next few weeks weren't too bad. She changed her birthday on a whim, drew pictures and wrote stories about hippogriffs and animagi that I knew to be Sirius Black and James Potter, but that she had called Snuffles and Prongs. Every so often she would have fits. Usually it started with a story. 

"Snuffles and Prongs aren't happy today." she muttered. "Because their friend Moony is gone."

I looked up from the letter I was writing to Snape regarding her progress with raised eyebrows.

"Gone? Where?"

She frowned.

"They don't know. But a nasty rat named Wormtail says he's gone forever. He can't be though, right?"

She looked at me with dark brown eyes that had once been shrewd and filled with the kind of knowledge I wish I had, but were now confused and begging for me to set things right.

"No, he's not gone forever." 

She nodded once and went back to her story. But ten minutes later she had thrown a glass at the door. It shattered into too many pieces to count and she started yelling.

"It wasn't Moony!" She yelled. "He was _lying_. That stupid rat was _lying_ and now Snuffles is _dead_! That rat killed _everyone_! I wish he would die! I'll kill him! I'll rip his head off and feed it to the wolves and I'll tear his arms and legs from his body and then . . ." She stopped, short of breath as I stood up and then collapsed into a heap.

"Hermione?" I asked hesitantly, kneeling next to her and putting a hand on her shoulder.

"It was all his fault." She said brokenly. "He was a traitor. Peter betrayed them! James and Lily and Sirius and Remus . . . . He as good as killed them. He ruined everything! I hate him. I wish I had killed him." She passed out again, and when she woke up she didn't remember it.

But I did. It was the first of many fits. Many strange moments that ended in a few minutes of clarity before it all ended. Then the nightmares started. I started working late hours to be with her, since I seemed to be the only one who could calm her down. She thrashed around, scratched at the bedclothes and at herself, screamed and sobbed and finally threw herself off of the bed. I usually managed to wake her up before she hurt herself, but other nurses tended to end up with black eyes or sprained wrists. 

One night she woke up and after crying for a few minutes, with me awkwardly looking on, she asked a question I never expected from her.

"Who are Harry and Ron?" Her voice was tiny, but enough to make my heart stop.

"Who?"

"Harry and Ron. I . . . I dream about them. All the time. Are they even real, or is it just me?"

I bit my lip.

"Harry Potter and Ron Weasley were your best friends." I said slowly. "They were killed by Death Eaters."

I had explained several weeks before what Death Eaters were, so she had no questions about them. Instead she looked at me.

"My best friends?" She shook her head. "More." 

That was the last word I heard from her until morning. After that her fits grew more frequent. Once, when I had been out buying lunch, she got a hold of some scissors and chopped her hair off. I came back to find her sitting on her bed, writing another story.

"Hermione, why'd you cut your hair?" I asked her.

"They liked it long. They're not here anymore, so I cut it all off."

Her answer unnerved me, but there wasn't anything I could do about it. I cleaned up the pile of hair swept into a far corner of the room with my wand and then settled down at the small table in her room to eat my lunch. A few times she glanced up but she didn't say anything. Finally, though, I got fed up with seeing her eyeing my food and when I heard her stomach growl loudly I sighed.

"Hungry?" I asked, unnecessarily. 

She nodded frantically and when I inclined my head toward the chair next to me she jumped up and sat down.

"They never bring me good food." she groused as I let her eat the rest of my food. "The only food I get is disgusting. Unpalatable." 

I blinked at her use of the word.

"Unpalatable?"

She flushed and ducked her head slightly. 

"That is the word, right?" When I nodded she smiled slightly. "I had a dream last night that Harry was cooking and he burned everything. I told him it was unpalatable. Ron was more crude. I almost laughed, but then I got sad."

She tilted her head back, her short hair a mess around her head, frizzy wisps falling across her forehead. 

"I wish I could remember them. Right now. I wish I could see their faces and hear their voices and know what they were like, instead of wondering if my dreams are accurate enough to build my memories on." 

I was surprised to see tears leaking out of her eyes. She'd always been rather stoic in my opinion. Always strong. She got scared sometimes. It had been downright amusing Fourth Year when Potter had been making his way through the maze. I'd watched her and Ron for a few minutes. He'd been pale as a ghost, but she'd been clutching at her cheeks like a lifeline. During Quidditch matches, if Potter was doing something especially posh and possibly dangerous to get the snitch, she'd do the same thing. But I'd never seen her cry. Not like this. Not without that aura of madness about her.

"I'm tired." she murmured finally. "I'm going to sleep, I think."

She napped for a few hours. I spent most of that time answering a letter from Snape who was keeping up with her condition. It was still a bit of a shock to think that Snape gave a damn about Hermione Granger. He'd hated her and Potter and Weasley at Hogwarts as much as I had, and now he was concerned about the last one standing. Every so often I'd look up, usually when she made a sound that could have indicated a nightmare. But she was fine, it seemed. She'd utter their names every so often in this heartbreaking little whimper, and she'd roll over and curl her hands beneath her head and heave a shuddering sigh.

I bit my lip as I watched her. It was odd to see someone who'd once been known for her mind, her depth and her ability to memorize and figure things out at a loss for the kinds of things most people took for granted. She couldn't remember her family, Harry or Ron. She could barely remember common spells let alone the complicated lot she'd turned on countless acquaintances of mine over the years. Her penmanship was horrible and sometimes in the middle of a story she'd stall out and frown so deeply I was sure she'd never be able to smooth the grooves of her forehead, and then she'd ask me of all people questions about her Snuffles and Prongs and Moony. 

I wondered what she'd think if she remembered me as I was. I was different now. After nearly a year with her I wasn't a selfish git of a man. I was still as cowardly as ever, but I had come to accept that. Still, if she were to recall what I'd done, I doubted she'd be able to forgive me. She probably wouldn't even believe me if I said I was a changed person. 

I wouldn't believe me. 

~*~

"Malfoy! Malfoy! Draco for Merlin's sake wake up!" 

I sat up, my comforter slipping down my naked torso, my wide eyes scanning my bedroom for the intruder. I finally recognized Snape, standing just inside of my bedroom door. 

"What the bloody hell're you doing here this late?" I asked, and then it hit me. "Is it Hermione? What's happened?"

He frowned.

"Just get dressed."

I slipped out of bed, pulling a sweater on over my head and buttoning up the pair of jeans I'd fallen asleep in earlier that evening. 

"What's going on?"

"She's having an . . . episode." he said slowly.

I stared at him incredulously. An episode? They'd handled Hermione in one of her episodes plenty of times before this. It had to be something more serious to warrant waking me up in the middle of the night. Didn't it?

"She only wants to see you." he finally told me. "She gave her nurse a concussion and if they weren't afraid to damage her further, they would have stunned her thirty minutes ago. She's been yelling for you since they moved her back."

I frowned.

"They sent her back to her old room? She's that bad?"

A terse nod was my answer and enough to send me rushing straight to St. Mungo's. Luckily, they were used to dealing with bouts of madness on Hermione's floor, so she hadn't disturbed anyone. At least that way she wouldn't have to deal with a large group of people with questions and admonishments. When I found myself standing in front of the one-way mirror that served as a wall for the room, she was standing in a corner, her head tipped back at a painful angle, her jaw practically unhinged to emit a horrendous screaming. 

A haggard looking doctor looked up when I tapped him on the shoulder.

"She wants to see me?"

"You sure you want to go in there? She's a bit dangerous right now, and we don't want to use any spells on her and make it worse. You'll be defenseless."

I looked up again as her wailing reached a painful crescendo. 

"I'll be fine." I said, though I wasn't too certain about it.

He sighed but nodded and unlocked the door behind him. The minute the door shut her screaming stopped. I walked into the dark room, standing just inside for a moment as I let my eyes adjust, all the while listening to her erratic breathing. Finally she spoke, her voice hard and more sane than I'd heard it for a long time.

"You called them my best friends," she said with no preamble. Much like the old Hermione, I thought. "But what do you know? Harry and Ron were more than that, closer than that. Everyone thought it was insane. They thought we were crazy because we said that we were in love with each other, the three of us. Mrs. Weasley never spoke to me again. Ginny thought I was a hore and never hesitated to tell me. Bill and Charlie were supportive, but they were never around. Only Fred and George were there for us all the time, until they were killed." She laughed then, a sharp, biting sound. "A year and a half of Auror training and seven more spent fending off Voldemort and we couldn't protect the two of them. Angelina and Tonks were there, watched their husbands die and looked at us with nothing but compassion before attacking those Death Eaters and dying just as valiantly as Fred and George."

I was silent. I had nothing to say. Not really. No condolences or apologies or other empty words invented for comfort. She didn't care. She just kept talking.

"Ever wonder why it was so bloody easy for me to kill your father? _That_ was why. He took off his hood back then too. With four of my dearest friends dead around me and Harry and Ron and I drowning in grief and hate he took off his hood and he laughed and he left before any of us could stop him. And I never forgot that moment." 

She was staring at me, her eyes suddenly as I remembered, and yet not. Full of life, but full of hate. They'd seen things I hadn't and it showed. She was showing it to me and it sent a bolt of fear piercing straight through my body.

"I remember one other moment." she said softly. "I remember when you took them from me. When you stood by and watched as they were tortured and murdered and I remember when you left for fear of your life because you knew I would kill you. You knew I wanted to kill you."

I never knew what hit me. Suddenly I was on my back and she was straddling my hips and her slim fingers were around my throat, effectively cutting off my air. 

"I want to kill you now." she hissed, leaning down until her nose was almost touching mine. "You called me a filthy Mudblood. You said I wasn't worthy to live. But you were wrong." She reared back and then slammed my head into the hard ground beneath me with a surprising amount of strength. Leastways, enough to make me see stars. "_You_ are the one who isn't worthy to live. _You_ are the filthy one. _You_ are the coward, the follower, the liar. _You_ are everything you thought you saw in me."

I growled low in my throat and threw her off of me. She flew back into the soft wall with a thud and slid to the ground, glaring at me and baring her teeth ferally.

"You think I don't know that?" I yelled at her. "You think I didn't realize long ago _why_ I hated you so much? You weren't even a pureblooded _Witch_ and you were better than me."

"And why couldn't you be more like me?" she asked, standing up and looking at me with raised eyebrows. "You settled for being less."

Which was true. Everyone knew it. I never strived for that level of perfection that the Hogwarts Trio had somehow managed to achieve. I just put them down in fits of jealousy and hoped that maybe I'd be lucky enough to become that perfect by accident. Stupid, spoiled Draco Malfoy, always waiting for life to arrive on his engraved, silver platter.

"You should have killed me." I told her finally. 

She stared at me for a moment before walking toward me. She kicked me hard, in the stomach. I recoiled and let out a hiss of pain. 

"You ran away before I could." she said softly, kicking me again, harder. "I spent three hours too weak to stand, lying among all those dead bodies and I went mad." Her foot connected with the small of my back, a hard blow to my kidneys that made me whimper. "I started looking for your body, sure you had died. You hadn't. You had gotten away. When Harry and Ron couldn't you had!" After several more blows she collapsed to her knees, her body bent so that her head touched the ground beside my own. "I didn't care much about after I killed you. I just wanted you dead. Then I was going to kill myself because life just wasn't worth anything without _them_." She began to sob. "And I went insane and I couldn't stop screaming and they locked me in here and then it all went blank. I was happy when I was blank, but it's back now. The reality of it." She sighed in a way that was entirely sane on one hand and completely insane on the other. "I'll kill you now, I think. And kill myself and it'll be fine because I'd rather die having achieved that than live a miserable, sad life."

I coughed slightly and stared at her. 

"You mean that." It wasn't a question. 

"Yes." she answered with a little sniffle.

I rolled stiffly onto my back, regarding the ceiling.

"Then let's do it." I said in a low voice that probably couldn't carry out of the room, and even then I really didn't care if it did or not. 

"What?"

"I have nothing to live for if you're sane and can live on your own. I've got nowhere to go, nothing to do. And if you're sane, you have nothing to live for because you have nowhere to go. Nothing to do."

"I won't technically be killing you." she murmured.

I laughed, a strangely happy sound.

"You really are back to normal, if you're concerned about technicalities."

She laughed too.

"A suicide pact then?" 

I looked over at her, into those eyes that were suddenly Hermione Granger again. Did I mean it? Yes, I did. After all, there really was nothing left for me. My whole life had been a lie up to this moment, and maybe it was a fit. A fit of momentary insanity, but it all felt so reality based I didn't care.

"Yeah, a suicide pact."

"Until the right moment?"

"Yeah, the right moment."

She smiled at me and asked for my hand. I gave it to her. She lifted my middle finger to her lips and bit down hard, piercing flesh. I watched as blood pooled in the small gash at the tip and then she did the same to her own. She pressed the wounds together and then pulled her finger away. Lifting it to me in a pseudo salute she sucked on it.

"Cheers, then."


End file.
